This invention relates generally to educational tools and more particularly to reading machines which are used as part of a remedial reading program to assist individuals with learning disabilities.
As it is known in the art, reading machines have been used to improve the educational attainment of individuals with learning disabilities. In general, known reading machines are computer based. That is, the reading machines often include a personal computer having specialized software that provides the reading machine function. In addition, the reading machines include other PC type components such as a monitor, an audio system, a disk or mass storage device, and a keyboard. In general, specialized software processes an input source document and generates synthetic speech to enable a user to hear the computer read through the document a word, line, sentence etc. at a time. Often these reading machines include a scanner to provide one technique to input source documents to the reader.
The scanner scans a document and provides an image file representation of the document to the personal computer. The personal computer using optical character recognition software produces an OCR file including generated text information. The OCR file is used by display system software to display a text-based representation of the scanned document on a monitor. The OCR file text is also used by speech synthesis software to synthesize speech.
One problem, therefore, with the known systems is that the visual display that is presented to the user is a character or OCR based representation of the scanned document. While this may be satisfactory for some types of documents such as those having plain text without columns or headings, in other types of documents which have context such as columns, headings as so forth, or documents which have graphical content, the context and graphical content are lost when the OCR representation of the document is displayed.